


The Horror In The Mountain

by Broba



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Archaeology, Body Horror, Eldritch, Horror, Lovecraftian, Other, Psychological Horror, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:00:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Broba/pseuds/Broba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kinkmeme prompt! The request was for a tale of eldrich horror, and this tale wrote itself in a couple of hours. Strange, how it came without any particular effort on my part. No matter though, I hope it is well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Horror In The Mountain

The afternoon light slanted through the myriad openings in the side of the mount, like a selection of wounds in the rock surface through which any number of chambers, galleries and passageways were exposed. The interior was a labyrinth and it had been a hard, frustrating three months of work to map the correct way through and down. Jake English was preparing to make the final descent into an antechamber that, he suspected, led to a tomb structure which had been long since carved into the bare rock. He was suspended by a rope and harness over a lengthy drop and his partner Dirk Strider slowly paid out rope high above him. The sloping walls that surrounded them tapered such that English was descending a stony cone towards a black end-point below him. The walls were carved with a spiralling patter of hieroglyphs, and in the electric light of the lantern English carried he could make out strange, looping and whorling sigils of an impossibly old race.  
  
The further they went into the mountain, the stranger seemed the location of this tomb. The original makers had clearly intended for it to remain unvisited, the location was inhospitable in the extreme and impossible to reach without specialised climbing gear, and yet why create such an ornate monument to an honoured dead that was never intended to be visited? English's musings were cut short as his boots hit rock bottom, and he called up above him to his partner.  
“I'm down!”  
“How is it?” Strider called back. The cone-shaped passage acted like an amplifier of sound, such that English could hear every slight noise from above funnelled perfectly down to him.  
“Ah. Ah! I see writing- it's everywhere.”  
“And the tomb?”  
“Yes. There's a square opening in the wall.”  
  
The opening was perfect, rigidly carved, and perfectly black even when English raised up his lamp. There was no lintel to speak of, but rather a lip of stone surrounding the black opening making it look less a door then a curiously squared-off mouth in the stone. The walls were moist with pale cloudy water that oozed through the stone, draining away over the long centuries through little channels in the rock floor. English licked his dry lips and advanced on the opening slowly.  
  
The inside of that place was a surprisingly small, tight space in the rock, a chamber with walls bearing the same strange writing and a low stone box at the far end. English had a vision of labouring hands working at the bottom of the world, in this tight, small pit at the end of darkness, slowly worrying away shards of rock to form out this room. Certainly in the close, poorly ventilated atmosphere candles or any kind of naked flame would have been ill-advised, they must have been working in pitch blackness. Hands bearing stone chisels and pieces of sharp obsidian, scratching and carving. Like wasp-grubs rubbing their whiskery faces endlessly against their papery cocoon prisons, they must have scratched away at the walls until through some sign understood by them all they knew their work was done. Had they then been allowed to leave, and find the light again? English wondered how much of the chalky dust underfoot was ancient bone. He traced the symbols on the walls, writing away in a notebook with his pen. He ignored the box for now, there would be time enough for that and there was more to learn here then could be gleaned in one session. He worked like that for a time, copying and annotating the writings in his book, until his eyes began to ache and burn. English realised that the air was becoming bad; he had used up too much of the available oxygen and the shape of the place was not condusive to replacing I quickly enough. He realised that he should have brought along his mask and cursed himself for a fool, but he had wanted to see this first-hand and not through cold lenses on his first trip down.  
  
Jake English withdrew from the room and tugged on the rope leading up and away into the dark, calling up.  
“Hi, I'm ready now.”  
English waited patiently, and then with mounting fear as nothing happened and there was no answer from up above. He was suddenly very aware, with a skin-crawling dread, of just how close the walls were. At this low level the cone-like structure could be clambered up, but when it began to open out more he would no longer be able to brace himself properly; this trap was one that was easy to get into but there was no way that he could leave without assistance.  
“Strider?” English waited. “Dirk?”  
English began to shake, and from behind him he could hear a long, low noise. Sharply cut off at first, the noise returned with a grinding inevitability. It was the sound of stone moving slowly, haltingly, over stone. From that black entrance behind him, with sweat-slicked wet walls coated in the writings of the blind mad carvers, he heard a sound such as of the lid of a stone box being shifted aside.  
“Dirk!”  
English tugged on the rope again in desperation and this time he felt an answering pull. He braced his boots against the wall and started to walk his way upward gratefully, behind him he heard nothing.  
  
English crested the lip of the descent and fount his footing, Strider was there with the rest of their climbing gear. He gazed blankly at English, and after a moment they embraced.  
“What happened?” English asked, “I thought you weren't there.”  
“I'm sorry. I don't know, it was strange. I think I fell asleep.”  
“Asleep! How is that possible, I was only gone a few minutes.”  
“English?”  
“What?”  
“You were down there for most of a day.”  
  
They returned to their base camp in silence, neither of them wished to discuss what had transpired, certainly not while they were still beneath the stony crust of the ancient mountain's skin. Base camp was a collection of tents and temporary structures they had erected close by the dig site, in the shadow of the mountain. The sun had set when they arrived, and the moon of that place was rising high in a course that made the glowing orb seem speared on the mountain's high finger. Waiting for them were their fellow party members, Jane Crocker and Roxy Lalonde. Jane was preparing an evening meal when the two men returned, while Roxy pored over some tome of long forgotten lore that she had been studying intently since they had arrived.  
  
English sat down heavily at the trestle table that they used as an unofficial meeting place and mess. Strider was practically somnolent and sat down carefully at the head of the table. Lalonde only looked up to briefly acknowledge them with a nod. Crocker began serving the evening repast, reaching out to ruffle English's hair playfully.  
“What did you find? You were gone so long we were worried,” Crocker said.  
“I don't really know yet,” English sighed, spreading out his notes before him, “the text is an unfamiliar dialect but I feel it may be a precursor to the linear Dersian-A that we saw at the last site.”  
“A precursor?”  
“Yes, look at the figures, they are far less sophisticated, and here- see? The carving is exquisite, but more basic. I would say that these texts probably pre-date the linear Dersian lines by some way.”  
“That's fascinating. Dirk?” She waved, and Strider just mad ea vague motion, “what's the matter with him?”  
English frowned, “it wasn't a pleasant little excursion I'm afraid. The fact is, we both found it strange, down there.”  
“Strange?”  
“Yes. I never realised how long I had been studying, and when I came up Dirk told me I had been gone far longer then I thought,” English didn't mention the box, he couldn't, “and since then Dirk's been a little quiet.”  
Lalonde looked up from her book, and glanced between the two men slowly.  
“I think we all need some rest,” she sighed. “Dirk?”  
At long last Strider looked up, he looked for all the world like a man in a dream slowly coming to consciousness. “Oh? Yes, of course. Let's sleep on it.”  
  
After a little dinner, they retreated to their tents. Although a little company would have been welcome to both men, neither of them elected to leave their own beds. Lalonde kissed Crocker on the cheek and bid her good-night, still carrying her book, and finally Crocker was left alone. She was always the last to sleep, she had a habit of seeing the others safely to bed before she went herself. She happened to glance upward and caught sight of the pole star high above. The baleful light of that star seemed to wink and waver in the sky, she could discern a certain baleful yellowness to the light that was novel to her experience. With a shudder, she went to her own cot to sleep.  
  
The events of the night were a strange affair indeed, and there was no telling in the minds of those who experienced what transpired whether it was real or pure phantasmagoria, or some distillation of both in equal mixture. Suffice it to say that the record of these events may seem similarly disjointed and with that quality of a dream to it.  
  
Jane Crocker sat up at a sound that came from within or without, she could not tell. She knew that some force had compelled her to awaken; a warning or a clarion bell in her heart calling her to alert wakefulness. She slid from her sheets and dressed in her linen underclothes quickly, seeking out a spare tent-pole for a staff and advancing cautiously to peer through the fastenings holding closed her tent flap. Outside, there was only mist- a mist that had come it seemed from above, high in the mountain to blanket and disguise the soil. Looking down, she saw that her own feet were lost in it, whereas there had been no hint of mist in her tent when she had awoken. Crocker left her tent, walking out and looking around her. There was a certain stately grandeur to the world when the high mountain and the tumble of great boulders that surrounded their site and kept out the worst of the weather were reduced to vague silhouettes in the whiteness.  
  
The wisps of foggy air were disturbed in a rising columnar vortex around her and Crocker saw the soil beneath her at last as she became the eye of a miniature hurricane that whipped the mist upward. The grasses were dead, and each long blade was rusted and dim. She wanted to call out but there was nothing, no air with which to form words. Some disturbance alerted her and she span, to see behind her a figure approaching from the south. A blueness coalesced from the misty white and there was a figure of a man, floating in the air as though supported by invisible hands. She saw his clothing ripple about him under the influence of whatever force held him aloft. He had a long, flowing hood that covered his face completely, leaving barely enough space to see through and no face was visible there. His shirt and trousers were ragged and torn, and as he came to her she saw that his arms were covered in a web-work of white, old healed scars.  
  
Jane Crocker held out the pole threateningly, but there was no substantial essence to strike and it passed through the phantasmal vision without resistance. As he approached the hood came up a little and she saw a withered face in silhouette, a hint of chin, a cheek limned in the dim light. She could make out no more then this however, and there was no suggestion of the age of this being. He was close enough now, and she too petrified to even move away, that the edge of his hood threatened to engulf her face. The material was cold, and damp. Crocker closed her eyes, her last recourse against the coming horror, but she could not stop up her ears to help herself from hearing it's voice when the being spoke. Jane Crocker came-to, and found herself alone in the camp site. There was no more any mist, nor when she looked up did the pole star gleam evilly as it had. She began to cry, collapsing to her knees. She had soiled herself in her terror and she could remember, though the voice was fading now, what the creature had said to her.  
 _“When the stars are right...”_  
  
In his own tent Dirk Strider was similarly unable to reach sleep, he had not even managed yet to keep his eyes closed longer then a blink. Every time he let his attention wander from the brightness of his electric lamp he found himself back in the cave system, watching over the yawning pit where his friend had gone. The first hours had been hard enough but when he realised that he had been rooted to the spot without so much as a shout from below for four hours he began to panic. He felt the rope with his hands, and sure enough there was a slight, varying tension there as English moved about far below, and yet he would not respond to Dirk's cries at all. Dirk paced the chamber restlessly, it was unthinkable that he would leave and impossible for him to reach the bottom himself without help. He sat and cradled his head in his hands helplessly.  
  
He had looked up fruitlessly when  he'd heard the chanting. There was nothing but rock and blackness surrounding him, and from somewhere out in the un-knowable beyond of the cave labyrinth there came the rhythmic pulsations of voices raised in chant. The rhymes were grating and foul to his ear, the content was similarly obscene even though he could not be sure of the language in any way. A thousand tongues gave voice to it and the chanting was growing louder. This place had been important, in times past. In another aeon men of a different time and race had toiled here endlessly, and their chants had marked off the changing of the seasons and of the times. Red-cloaked boys walked back and forth in patterns that were as intricate as they were maddening. Dirk could see them clearly, all of a sudden. They all had the same face, they all had black empty spaces instead of eyes, hidden behind sun-glasses with smoked-glass lenses to protect them from any light.   
  
Strider cried out, calling to English or to anyone to help him but to no avail. They surrounded him in a tightening gyre of bodies, marching and chanting in perfect time. They were aware of him and yet not, they were of the world and yet not, there were present and yet distant all at once. Strider clawed at his own face and hammered his fists against the rock floor, hoping through some exercise of pain to throw the visions from his brain. The chanting became louder and more insistent, and synchronised within his head to leave no more space for his own thoughts.  
  
Dirk Strider stared into the burning light of his lamp and wept silently, unable to move from his bed. The chanting had been eldrich and wrong, it was a tongue that belonged in a different time and place. The time of Men held no place for that dead language, the worlds and the stars had moved on and left those speakers behind. Yet, some remnant had come crawling from the primeval much of that cave and he had taken the sound of those voices out with him into the light and air. Strider went to the washbowl that sat on a trestle and splashed water on his face. He looked up and into his shaving mirror, before he recoiled in horror. His eyes were no longer his own eyes, they were the eyes of another man who stared out of his skull. His mouth parted and another man's tongue began the chant again, speaking through his flesh with borrowed breath. He could taste something foul and his breath came out in hot gusts that steamed the mirror. With a strangled cry he held it up and stared into the ancient eyes now set into his skull. They stared back at him in mocking red splendour, his eyelids were crisped and raw-red, the slight wrinkles at the corners were filled like runnels with the fluid of ruddy, rust coloured tears. His mouth flapped and worked raggedly, eager to complete the chant no matter the cost to his poor abused skin and muscles. Dirk Strider tried to speak but his voice was no longer his own, and the flesh within his flesh was determined to speak for him. He hurled down the mirror with a sharp crack. Looking down, he saw a long spoke of glass in the shattered frame and picked it up. He would a length of his wash-cloth around the base of the shard and took hold of his lower lip that worked and yammered wetly against his fingers. With a low, despairing moan he pressed the end of the makeshift knife between his teeth that gnashed against the glass, and speared his tongue.  
  
The book beside Lalonde's cot was a grim tome indeed, it had been written in the crabbed hand of a madman in centuries past. The original was long destroyed, this was a later copy that had been made by hand, and as Roxy had read through each forbidding chapter the script had become more shaky and unintelligible. Whole passages descended into blank scrawl or sometimes a series of crude marks all swaying in the same direction. It was hard going, but she couldn't seem to give up on it even when the text abandoned the pretence of words altogether and became a series of increasingly intricate geometric symbols. Unable to get to sleep, Lalonde pulled the book into her lap and fetched her electric flashlight to do a little more reading. Jake believed that he had found the precursor to linear Dersian-A which meant that their investigations had taken them further back in time even then the original writer of this book. The clues held in the grimoir she held gingerly in her lap might be key to unlocking that earlier, most ancient language.  
  
She traced a hand over the ancient pages and her lips moved silently, her brow furrowed and she tried to make sense of it. The patterns were inexplicable but before her eyes they separated and became individual, discrete images of scenes that unfolded in her mind's eye. She saw children endlessly sacrificed to a hungry machine that would never- could never- stop. A pale hand came down gently on her shoulder and Lalonde froze. There was someone there with her, of that she was sure. She saw, from the corner of her eye, a hand reach down delicately to touch the page and trace over a spiral. Lalonde gasped, following the meaning of it.  
“That's the journey through aeons, between places separated by walls of law.”  
The hand seemed to caress the page and dance between inky points against the pale surface.  
“Yes, the stars- between the stars,” Lalonde frowned, focussing on a section of scrawl that had hitherto been impossible to read.  
“But... the stars have to be... correctly placed, first. Only when the stars are right?”  
  
Lalonde turned eagerly, she could at last divine the meaning behind the page, and hovering into her sight she saw the face of her benefactor who was sat beside her sharing her bed. She looked into eyes that held only endless time and the vast aching oblivion between places. She saw all at once that she was sitting in a helplessly shallow pool of light surrounded on all sides by an abyss through which coursed a myriad leviathan forms in their endless ways. Their unfathomable bodies linked end-to-end formed a long skein through the blackness, the pathways formed by their flesh made a net that ensnared the cosmos. Lalonde knew, then, that she was too small a creature even to elicit the notice of such things as swam endlessly outside the narrow confines of her experience, but that the slightest whim of those endless, nightmarishly vast intelligences could see her extinguished without so much effort as taking a breath. Though she might learn the history of this aeon and the one preceding it, through all of the ancient writings to be found in the unknown dark corners of the world, still she had achieved nothing and was no more aware then a mote of dust caught temporarily in a sunbeam. Lalonde began to scream as that madness took root and erased instantly everything in her that might once have been a self, leaving her barren and burned from the very roots of her outward.  
  
Jake English lay on his bed, running through the events of the day over and over in his mind. He was sure that he had heard the opening of that stone box behind him as he had withdrawn to safety. He closed his eyes and he could see the writing on the walls again. This time, he could see more clearly and his imagination showed him the glyphs clearly as though they were outlined in a pale yellow light. He saw clearly the meaning of the words, and he knew that the writings spoke of a coming congregation of celestial bodies, that would be marked by the arrival of an asteroid that would be seen in the skies only when the stars were right. He knew now that the ancient ones who had carved out that pit in the ground had been skilled astronomers who named and charted the stars in their courses. He knew it as though he had been there with them, watching the skies and noting dispassionately the precise time and place of their own oblivion. He saw clearly the astronomers write down the name of the dog star, and next to this they wrote down symbols which together made up the words for black-saint-sword-angel. That was who came, who arrived at the time of the asteroid when the stars were right, and brought down endless night and death to all that lived, and though they died the flesh of mortals would be bound to rise again as his eternal slaves. Jake English stood on top of the high mountain and held up his hands, thumb to thumb and finger to finger, forming a diamond whose points encompassed the pole star and the dog star. He knew now that the time had finally come, that those ancient astronomers had marked down with a weary resignation. English turned to watch the city that had stood with its' back to the mountain, and watched as the men of those days in times long past chose to end themselves and forget all that they had learned. He saw sickness and disease run unchecked, as women and children were led weeping but compliant to the slaughter of long blades. The warriors who had guarded the high yellow walls were the last, they hurled themselves from their battlements to die below, knowing that with their deaths the secrets of that place were sealed, once and for all. Blood was their sealing covenant and they went to endless silent oblivion gladly, choosing an end to pain instead of the searing light of knowledge that was too much to bear.  
  
English turned away from the smell of burning flesh on the wind, and he was again seeing the mountain as it was to him in the day time when he had gone down into the caves, silent and ancient, seemingly untouched. Now however he knew that this had once been the site of a metropolis lost so far into time that not even dust remained.  
  
The form that he saw suspended in the heavens above him was clothed in a darkness so complete that the night's sky was a lighter velvety blue behind her silhouette. A female, descending from the realm of stars to the waiting spire of the high mountain. Her limbs were the span of the horizon, her hair spread out around her to blot out the moon and the stars with ease, and her coming was foretold but all of the authors of antiquity. Her legs parted to stand astride the mountain, and English saw that this goddess of the wastes between worlds had come to give birth to all of the terrors she bore within her body, a vessel and a chamber, and a world in herself to a civilisation of alien intent and shocking form. She birthed then the hordes of screaming, shambling, knotted squamous things that would be the horror and the end of all that was alive and thinking. Jake English screamed as he was washed away by a torrent of ichor that would flow until the world was filled up, so that the children of the dog star could have a home for a time, until the stars shifted again and the great dark goddess of the black-saint-sword-angel once again went to the other places and left her broodlings to wither and die in her stead, to form a caul with their bodies that would enclose everything in the waxy soft soap of their putrescence.  
  
Jake English knew that he was to die, and that his passing was no more in the minds of these creatures then a fleck of sunlight of a dying star as it was snuffed out by their hand. There would be nothing, then, but a world turned to ice and abandoned by all life. All history was coming to an end, and the culmination of all human effort and ingenuity was nothing at all. Jake English remembered the yellow city and surrendered his body to the waiting grasping pseudopodia of the children of the dog star. Better to die forgotten then to live with a knowledge too great to be borne by a mind no more then human.  
  



End file.
